Rethinking Corporate Decision-Making for Corporate Financial Sustainability: A Critical Literature Review and Future Research Agenda
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68050/JAMS.2026.722Keywords:
corporate financial sustainability, corporate decision-making, behavioral finance, corporate governance, critical literature reviewAbstract
Corporate financial sustainability (CFS) has become a defining performance criterion for firms amid volatile capital markets and stakeholder scrutiny, yet the literature linking corporate decision-making to CFS remains fragmented across disciplinary silos. This review evaluates how investment, financing, dividend, risk management, and resource allocation decisions shape financial sustainability and identifies assumptions and limitations that constrain the field. Following a critical review protocol, 152 records were retrieved from the Web of Science using a Boolean string that combined corporate/managerial/financial decision terms with financial sustainability, resilience, and stability outcome terms, and was restricted to English-language articles (2004–2026) in Economics, Business, Finance, and Management. Of these, 110 records with complete metadata were retained for synthesis. The corpus clusters around five decision domains: analytical/quantitative diagnostics, behavioural/cognitive influences, governance and ownership, digital/AI-enabled decision support, and institutional/crisis-context decision-making, but is marked by definitional inconsistency, cross-sectional/single-country design reliance, sparse theory, and an integrity concern illustrated by one retracted study. The review is bound by its search string, database, and language restrictions; it calls for re-conceptualizing CFS as a multi-level, decision-contingent construct. Managers and boards should treat sustainability-oriented decision-making as an integrated portfolio problem, with ownership and governance quality as boundary conditions. The review offers an integrative framework that links five decision domains to CFS through literacy, transparency, and intellectual-capital mechanisms, moderated by ownership, governance, and digital capability, and provides a grounded agenda for future research.
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